


Ricochet

by tortuosity



Series: A Full Bottle and Bones to Break [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Trauma, Drug Addiction, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Procedures, Pre-Relationship, Recovery, or as happy as fallout gets, religious trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:54:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24987874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortuosity/pseuds/tortuosity
Summary: When Cait's demons threaten to overpower her, Vault 95 becomes the answer to her prayers. But she's not the only one in need of benediction.
Relationships: Cait/Female Sole Survivor
Series: A Full Bottle and Bones to Break [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1808800
Comments: 25
Kudos: 39





	1. Cait

**Author's Note:**

> I recently got into Fallout 4, and—in a surprise to absolutely no one who's read anything I've written before—instantly fell in love with Cait. The urge to write fic consumed me and, well... here we are. A few quick notes:
> 
> 1) I swapped canon Nate and Nora's professions.  
> 2) For the most part, I attempted to write Cait's accent as it appears in the subtitles.  
> 3) This is not meant to be a completely realistic portrayal of addiction. Not that I'd expect one in a game with a magic detox chair, but I thought I'd mention it just in case. I also removed the option of Addictol, because it felt too video game-y to me.  
> 4) I've got a Spotify playlist over this way, if you're interested in that stuff: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0SwU4Om0Ji0lf2BGAAv2LR?si=WoywKKYSRXayIXqMgHwhdQ
> 
> Lastly, a content warning: This is a pretty dark fic, even by my standards. There are detailed descriptions of drug use and its consequences, as well as what happens in Vault 95's detox room. If those sorts of things make you squeamish, you might want to give this one a pass.

Cait’s hands itch. She balls them into fists and closes her eyes.

It always starts with an itch. Not a surface itch, like a rash or lice, but deeper, _under_ the skin, microscopic shards of glass swimming through her blood, shredding the insides of her veins like crepe paper. It starts in her fingertips: a tingle, then a sting, so goddamn annoying she could rip her own nails off. And then it spreads. If it stayed in her hands she could deal with it, but it always spreads. Up her wrists, past the scars, elbow to shoulder and then it’s in her heart, crawling, cutting through the chambers and with one beat it’s to her head, hot razorblades across her brain, right beneath the skull, until it’s so fucking bad she’s dying to take one of those saws off the wall and slice her head open like a melon just to _get it out_.

Sometimes it passes. Sometimes, she can curl up into a ball in a corner somewhere and rock and cry and grind her teeth to dust, and then the pain, the urge retreats, fading so slowly she can’t be sure she’s ever lived without it.

But most times, it doesn’t go away. Most times, it takes and it takes until there’s nothing left but the needle in her leg. Or her arm. Or whatever body part’s convenient. She’s not exactly picky by that point.

Her forearm’s tingling now. Fuck.

Think about something else. Anything else.

 _Maria_.

It’s not right, is it—to focus on another human being like some sort of guiding beacon? Maria would hate it if she knew. She’s got her own demons; it’s not so hard to see if you know where to look—the anxious glances, her twitchy trigger finger, the way she spooks when someone touches her back, a few too many drinks every time they hit the bars… yeah, not hard at all. Every time Maria walks into a room, even the ones that should be safe (especially the ones that should be safe), she makes a beeline for the corner farthest from the door.

They nearly ran into each other the first time it happened. Shite thing to have in common.

Maybe that’s why Maria bothers to talk to Cait when she doesn’t seem to have five words to spare for anyone else. Maybe there’s an unspoken bond between people who have traveled through hell.

Cait shakes her head. It’s stupid. They both might watch the shadows a little too closely, but she’d bet all her caps that Maria isn’t hiding alone on the floor of a shack right now, trying desperately _not_ to shoot up the Psycho that’s just sitting in that desk over there—

Fucking hell, she just _had_ to go and think about it, didn’t she?

Distraction. She needs one—and quickly, before she loses it completely. Think of her instead. Short black hair, brown skin. Warm eyes, though she likes to hide them behind those sunglasses. Nice lips. Nice arse, too. It’s not easy scavenging any private time in the increasingly crowded suburban corpse they’re calling home, but if they could, and if Maria was willing, God, the things Cait would do…

“Dammit.” The back of her head hits the wall with a soft thud. That’s a little too perverse, even for her. Every once in a while, having a wank can stave off the cravings for a few hours, but she’s too far down the hole already. And besides, right here, right now, fantasizing about the woman who pulled her free from the fight pit, gave her a second chance she never deserved, crosses some sort of line, she’s sure of it.

What is she even meant to be _doing_ with this new lease on life, anyway? Sure, the Combat Zone was a shitehole to end all shiteholes, but at least she had routine, expectations, the sweet promise of eventual destruction. Back there, her world was reduced to a pinprick tunnel: fights, pain, sex and booze and chems. Every day a new opponent, a new wound to stitch, a new excuse to keep using. The junk fed her anger, dragged her wretched excuse for a life to each new radioactive dawn. Rage is nature’s analgesic, after all, and Cait’s never been in danger of running low on things to numb.

Better to fight someone else than yourself, at any rate.

But now? Out here in the big wide Commonwealth? She’s spinning her wheels. Some of the goody-goody dumbfucks here like to talk about “standing united” and “protecting the people,” but Cait would rather scoop her own eyeballs out with a rusty spoon and eat them raw than buy into any of that bullshit. They won’t catch _her_ building houses for sad ratty children and puppies.

Nobody fucking did that for her, did they?

Maria doesn’t seem interested in any of that, thank God. Cait guesses waking up from a two hundred-year deep freeze doesn’t exactly bring out someone’s charitable side. Maria’s motivations—at least the one’s she’s bothered to share—are personal. Someone murdered her husband and stole her baby. Kill the fuckers, get the kid back, to hell with the rest. Simple enough. Cait can respect that.

It was rough, though, gleaning that little insight. Half a bottle of rotgut and the wrong words out of Cait’s stupid mouth (about her own damn family, like anyone needs to know about _that_ ), and suddenly Maria was sobbing all over the bar. _He’s all I have left_ , she said. _They took everything from me._

Cait’s fingers start to twitch, then jerk. It feels like there’s a million tiny hot wires plugged into her muscles, running off her leaking battery of a brain.

She bought Maria a room that night. She made sure she was safe and tucked in after she passed out, then she left, ducked into an alley, and shot up enough Psycho to kill a brahmin. It should’ve stopped her heart. But she woke up. In a puddle of her own puke, maybe, with a broken nose and coughing up blood, but she did. And she remembered. Despite her best efforts, she always wakes up, and she never forgets.

When they met up again the next day, Maria didn’t ask, and Cait didn’t tell.

She shivers violently, slamming her jaw shut to keep her teeth from clacking. When she drops her head into her hands, her skin is slick with a cold sweat, plastering her hair to her forehead.

Why would they take a baby? Did they want him as a hostage? A trap? Are they just using him to get to Maria? Or do they want to—oh, God— _raise_ him? Her stomach lurches and she gags, but there’s nothing to bring up. She could end this misery; it’s right _there_ in the damn desk, second drawer down—

“No,” she tells herself, though it’s far too late for a pep talk. “No, get through it. You don’t need that shite.”

But she needs it. God, she fucking needs it, because things are starting to flicker around the edges of her vision and whisper in her ears.

There was a man purchased in the same auction as her. Randall. _We’re already slaves_ , he said when he saw the pockmarked bruises covering her body. _You can’t let chems be another master_. He used to be like her, he explained, until he broke free from his addiction through the power of prayer. When she was in the grips of withdrawal, shaking and delusional, Randall held her and begged her to think of Jesus, to let His love see her through safely to the other side.

She knows all about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Her parents were good Irish Catholics. Every beating they gave her was done in the Lord’s name, to cleanse her of sin. When her mother tied her up and her father took a sledgehammer to her left knee the second time they caught her running, they claimed—

— _This is all in God’s plan_ —

It’s _his_ voice, so close, so real she can feel the heat of his breath at her temple. Cait’s focus slips, blurs like a camera lens covered in oil. Is it really idolatry to revere a woman named Maria? She may not be full of grace, but is anyone?

— _You shall have no other gods before me_ —

Where was He when she was tortured, when she was raped, when she was left for dead? If she can’t find Him in a syringe or at the bottom of a bottle, where else is she supposed to look? Maybe He’s decided she’s not worth saving. He wouldn’t be the only one.

A pained sound wrenches free from her chest, a dying animal moan. Fuck their god. God was dead and buried long before those nukes even hit, long before Maria descended into the Vault.

— _For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God_ —

As for her parents, those faithful members of His flock, well… they were praying for salvation when she pulled the trigger.

— _and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus_ —

Cait climbs unsteadily to her feet and staggers toward the desk, her father’s (or is it her Father’s?) words ringing in her ears, her mother’s face, twisted with fear, flashing across her eyes.

— _O God, you know my folly; the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you_ —

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” she murmurs, fumbling with the drawer handle. “The Lord is with thee.”

She should’ve started firing straight away, as soon as she kicked the door down. But she wanted them to know. She wanted them to have the slightest glimpse of the twenty-three years of pain they gave her.

“Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” The Psycho is buried under piles of paper and junk, as if that’s meant to deter her. She digs.

Her mother was first. Cait pressed the barrel of her revolver to her head—pressed it hard enough to hide her hand’s trembling, and she spoke, then screamed, spitting all the hatred she had held onto for years, a broken dam of fury. The sun was so bright that day, shining through the holes in the walls.

— _Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me_ —

Between the twitching and the crying, she misses her leg with the first jab, piercing the fabric of her pants instead. She takes a deep, shuddering breath and works the needle free for a second try. “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she recites, her thumb fluttering against the plunger. Words she hasn’t said in years, yet they jump readily and obediently to her lips.

Her father was unusually quiet after his initial burst of excuses and pleas, though admittedly, seeing your wife take three rounds to the chest would be a little sobering for anyone. He refused to look at her, refused to acknowledge his part in her tragedy. One last rejection. It enraged her so much she emptied the rest of the chamber into him. The sad _click_ when she jammed the barrel under her chin and squeezed the trigger sent her to her knees, and she wept there on the sun-warmed, moldy carpet, alone.

“Pray for us sinners.” She barely feels the minuscule needle puncture her thigh, but Psycho always makes its presence known with a harsh burn upon injection. “Now and at the hour of our death.”

Her breathing and mind still, hovering in that empty, anticipatory gap before the stimulant floods her neurons. That thirty-second window between the burn and the kick is the only time Cait’s ever known peace.

Twenty seconds, and everything that came before won’t matter. Fifteen seconds, and this aching, broken husk of a body will no longer be hers. Ten seconds, and the two cadavers rotting on the floor of a Boston trailer won’t be her fault.

Five more seconds, and she will feel nothing but anger. Anger is simple, clean. Anger is easier.

“Amen.”


	2. Maria

Nighttime is so much darker here. It’s funny; when she and Nate first moved to Sanctuary Hills, they spent so many nights stargazing in the backyard, crowing about what a good idea it was to move out of Boston and to the burbs. She couldn’t wait to leave. Boston, where man showed his dominance over nature by crowding out the stars with fluorescent bulbs, kept on all night just because he could, never felt like home.

But that was before. Before the impact shook the ground and the sirens assaulted her eardrums, before the mushroom cloud colored the sky brighter than all the lights in Boston combined. Here in the future (or is it the present? She’s still not sure what to call it), light is as coveted a resource as food or clean water.

Maria looks up at the dazzling array of stars and wonders if she ought to be more in awe. How many kids were inspired to join the USSA merely by staring into the sheer vastness of space? Not so many anymore, she guesses, given the Space Administration and everything else was fubared two centuries ago. What do kids now think about when they look heavenward? Are they overwhelmed? Do they feel small and insignificant? Or do they feel what Maria feels, what she felt when she saw the northern lights in Anchorage: almost nothing, save a vague unease that she _should_ be feeling something more.

But all she’s feeling at the moment is the start of a backache.

She shifts around on the ground, folding one leg beneath her, then the other, searching for the magic contortion that will stave off the impending pain. “The best of the best surgeons” and _this_ was what they gave her. Too bad her time in the freezer didn’t fix it.

Not too many peoples still awake, judging by the few lights in the windows. Garvey dropped the “Hills” bit when he and his people got here, so now it’s just “Sanctuary.” Far too corny and optimistic for what the place really is: a dump. A dump full of dead memories. _Her_ dead memories. _Her_ dead husband three hundred feet below the gutted remains of their suburban dream.

“Husband” being, perhaps, a more loaded word than her reality with Nate. They met in Alaska while she was in the service. He was close to finishing law school, she was… doing a lot of things she’d rather not think about. They got on like a house on fire. He was altruistic, soft-spoken, gentle—all the things she’s never been. When she was injured and subsequently discharged during her fourth tour, he was one of the few who bothered to stick by her while she was drugged up and useless in a hospital bed, helping her navigate that unfamiliar and scary labyrinth known as “veteran’s benefits.”

So when a combination of a shiny new diagnosis and subpar insurance threatened to drown Nate in medical debt, it only seemed practical to marry him.

It was a beautiful farce. They played the roles of husband and wife expertly in public while they pursued other men and women in private, respectively. And when they wanted a child, it only seemed practical for Nate to be the father.

Maria allows herself a tiny smile remembering the way his face went scarlet when she passed him the specimen cup. _We really can’t do anything the conventional way, can we?_ he said, laughing, and marched for the bathroom as well as any soldier.

No, they couldn’t, yet somehow they made it work. He was never the love of her life, but he was her best friend. And now he’s gone, a perfectly preserved corpse in a cryo-pod casket, Vault 111 his tomb.

She moves a fraction of an inch the wrong way and a hot spike lances down her lower back and into her leg. It steals the breath from her lungs and prickles her eyes with tears. Grimacing, she stands and removes any trace of a slouch from her posture; the dull ache of at-attention is preferable to the vengeful stabs of a jilted dorsal root. Sometimes it works, anyway.

A light goes out in one of the far shacks—Cait’s. Maria’s surprised to see her hit the hay first; she’s usually up at all hours, wearing a trench into the floorboards with her constant pacing. She’s chosen to sequester herself on the outskirts of Sanctuary Hills, and her abrasive personality and dodgy reputation do a good job keeping the others away—an arrangement Cait seems perfectly content with.

God, she’s trouble. She makes the most bloodthirsty meat eaters in Special Forces look downright herbivorous. She’s ten pounds of fury in a five pound sack. A chained-up, mangy junkyard dog that can’t tell the difference between the hand that feeds and the hand that hits, so best bite them all just to be safe.

But Maria’s always been a sucker for strays, hasn’t she?

Despite her best efforts to hide it, Cait’s got something more beneath her harsh surface, Maria’s sure of it. It tends to come out in bits and pieces, droplets: a backward glance at a derelict playground, a stash of well-worn comic books hidden under the bed, a foreign gentleness in her voice the few times they’ve talked about Shaun. And sometimes it comes out in a flood, a torrent of anguish that erodes Maria’s practiced apathy down to the bone, leaving only an aching sympathy behind. She comes away from each confession feeling completely unmoored. The horrors of war are distant and impersonal—the horrors of Cait’s past are anything but.

It’s a bond Maria never expected to make. She bets it’s not one Cait expected, either; every admission comes underlined with a dare: _this will be the one that makes you hate me_. When she told Maria about her parents’ deaths one rainy evening over too many shots of Vadim’s moonshine, she never once looked away, holding Maria’s gaze within her own while she revealed each new, terrible detail with blood-chilling composure. And when she was done recounting the tale, done peeling herself open, she fell silent, waiting. Waiting for what, exactly, Maria wasn’t sure. Disgust, maybe. Anger, rejection, pity.

Probably didn’t expect Maria to offer a few awkward reassurances before bursting into tears over her own family. Not one of her finest moments.

It doesn’t matter. _Focus on the mission, soldier_. Not the screwed up cage fighter with a too-rare smile and a knack for tugging her heartstrings. Christ. She’d never hear the end of it if Nate were here.

Standing was a mistake. The pain’s decided to start shooting through both legs, lightning bolts from ass to heels. Her knees threaten to buckle. And—stupidly, confoundingly—the only thought that works its way through the din in her head is _it’s not fair_.

One vertebra snapped nearly in half, another partially crushed. A wonder she could feel her legs at all. A wonder she wasn’t shitting herself when they found her in that Alaskan foxhole. They gave her two titanium rods, four screws, and a prescription for Med-X. Oh, they were so proud of their work. Back pats all around for getting that poor heroic soldier to walk again. What happened to her afterward was of little consequence.

One year of convalescence. One year of bed rest and physical therapy and putting one foot in front of the other. A miraculous recovery, they said. They praised her grit and discipline, declaring her stubbornness a crucial asset in her fast turnaround. The Army retired her, gave her some medals and ribbons for her trouble. Even First Sgt. Gutierrez called to say he was proud of her—the first and only time her father would utter those words.

When she was finally allowed to return home, she gathered her uniform, her dog tags, her ribbons and medals, shuffled a miserable quarter-mile to the Charles River, and dumped the remnants of her old life into the water.

Now she shuffles a miserable fifty feet to the house she’s picked to squat in, every step providing another wave of agony. It’s not her house, not from before. Garvey said she could have her old house to herself, that it was only right, but when she saw that crib…

She can’t remember who used to own this place. The Whitmans? Whitfields? She never was good at getting to know their neighbors; that was always Nate’s forte. Hopefully the Whitmans or the Whitfields or whoever the hell they were won’t mind her borrowing their house.

There, she’s through the door. One step at a time. Fuck, it hurts.

It’s not fair. She never asked to witness the apocalypse. She never asked to lose her whole team. She never asked to be captured by those fucking commie bastards, to have them shatter her back, to need to claw and crawl across the tundra to escape. She never asked to watch her husband be murdered and her child kidnapped, to wake up in this nightmare hellscape without them. She never asked to live.

She collapses in the only chair in the room. Every single nerve in her lower body is on fire, piercing and tingling all at once, crying wolf for a years old—now a centuries old—wound. Reaching for a pencil and a ragged strip of old shirt placed on a side table, she tries to call on that fabled stoicism the docs loved so much, breathing through a pain that’s almost as bad as childbirth.

Let no one say she’s not resourceful. She survived alone in a warzone, after all; the Commonwealth in 2287 isn’t so different. Just more radioactive. Maybe a little more friendly. She slips off her jacket, letting it pool on the seat behind her.

There are no pills in the future.

The muscles in her lower back spasm, uselessly fighting to hold up a spine that’s fused and bolted in place. She chokes back a sob and begins to tie the fabric around the lower half of her left bicep. It’s a pain in the ass to do one-handed, but she’s not about to ask for help. Not with anything, and certainly not with this. The inside of her elbow is a mess: swollen and splotchy with bruises, fresh purple-blue and stale yellow-green, and littered with dots, some scabbed and red. Only reason she needs a damn tourniquet, but at least it doesn’t seem infected.

Clumsily, she manages the first knot. They’re making the trip south to Diamond City tomorrow. Valentine seems to think a man who used to live there might be the one who took Shaun. It’s the only lead they have.

Maria sets the pencil over the first knot, wrapping the loose ends of the tourniquet over it to make a second knot. She will turn his house inside out if she has to. And if, so help her god, he’s still there… she’ll turn him inside out, too. The military taught her all the ways to break a man; she’s ready to use every one of them if it gets her to Shaun. Valentine better not have a weak stomach underneath that plastic skin.

The pencil now tied down, she starts to spin it, tightening the wrap far beyond what she could do on her own with just one hand. She might ask Cait to come along. It’s doubtful Cait has a passion—or the attention span—for detective work, but she’s got a good eye, and it’d be better for her than sitting around here.

The pressure on her arm is just shy of uncomfortable; the tourniquet is set. She slips the last bit of cloth-end over the pencil and secures it to her arm to keep it from unwinding. So maybe she wants Cait around because Maria doesn’t exactly trust Valentine’s magnanimity. She needs someone who can sniff out deceit. Lord knows Maria can’t—Alaska proved that.

Maria focuses on the mission when she reaches under the end table for the one bottle of vodka she hasn’t drained yet and dribbles it over her arm and the needle, wincing as it stings wounds not quite healed. She focuses on the mission when she draws a syringe-full of Med-X from the vial in the drawer and guides the needle into her abused, bulging vein.

This route works fast, so much faster than the pills ever did. Within seconds, she’s enveloped in the world’s warmest, softest blanket, awash in thick, heavenly security. There is no pain here. No war, no stolen children, no dead parents. She is not in 2077 or 2287, but somewhere in between, and then outside, beyond any concept of time or space. Reality fades, dim and desaturated. She sighs and sinks lower into the chair, melts into it, though she barely registers her own body’s movements. Her breathing slows, her eyes drift shut. She slips away.

Numbness is easier. Better to not feel at all. 


	3. Cait

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place several weeks after the previous one.

She finds Maria facedown on the floor.

At first, Cait doesn’t register what she’s seeing. The signal limps from her eyes to her brain, stumbling through a comedown fog as it tries to match patterns of recognition. _She’s just sleeping_ , it says dumbly, which of course she fucking is, but Maria didn’t just tip out of that chair to have a quick nap. Cait’s thoughts circle the drain, drowning out an instinctual panic fighting for air in the pipe. She moves dream-slow, taking one hesitant step before noticing the empty bottle settled into the gap in the floorboards, the tie around Maria’s arm, the goddamn _syringe_ —

The world zooms back into focus with a kick so hard it puts Psycho to shame. Cait crouches down to roll Maria onto her side and jams two fingers against the side of her neck, her own heart thundering in her ears. Still alive, but the throbs under her fingertips are closer to flutters, spaced too far apart. Maria’s eyes are closed, and her mouth is dropped open slightly—she looks, for all intents and purposes, dead.

“What the hell did you do?” Cait whispers, working her nails into the tight knots of the tourniquet to untie it. No wonder Maria always insisted on wearing that leather jacket, no matter how brutal the heat—by the looks of the track marks littering her left forearm, she’s no blushing virgin with the needle, and God knows what that Preston and his little club would do if they found out their precious General’s a user. Which means something went wrong. A bad batch, or the wrong cocktail, or just plain desperation if the cravings were bad enough.

Cait doesn’t have to work too hard to figure it out. Not too many chems are intravenous; they’re not easy to take without help, and, more importantly, the Commonwealth is filthy. The risk of infection is too high to be worth the hit, and a dealer won’t last long if their customers keep dying from blood poisoning. Smokeables, dissolvable tabs, or single-use intramuscular pens like Psycho do a much better job keeping the customer base alive and hungry.

But the marks, the tourniquet, the big fucking needle on that syringe… can’t get any more obvious than that.

“Mixin’ Med-X and booze… Jesus, Maria, what were you thinkin’?”

She _wasn’t_ thinking, apparently. Enough knowledge to shoot herself up, not enough to avoid combining downers. Didn't even know to take the damn tourniquet off before injection to keep the junk from leaking—no wonder she's got an arts and crafts project on her arm. Must not have picked up those little tips back before the war. Well, she’ll learn them now, if she makes it through. She’d better.

Cait’s witnessed her share of overdoses. A minority were suicides. Though a bullet’s faster, a noose easier to find, some prefer a softer method, and the right chems will do that job; send you drifting right off into death’s warm embrace. She was five when she saw her first one. A neighbor—she didn’t know his name, but he went to their church sometimes. Poor bastard fell into a ditch near the edge of the trailer park and never woke up. They found a note in his home afterward, and that was that. Mystery solved.

But Maria doesn’t fit that bill. Sure, the trail’s run cold on her son’s whereabouts, but if anything, it’s only made her more fervent. Fear, anger, and a desire for vengeance are a potent fuel; Cait knows that much. There’s no chance Maria’s fizzled out.

So maybe it’s more mundane. Maybe Maria just fucked up. Most of the overdosers Cait’s seen never meant to kill themselves, at least not on purpose. All it takes is the right amount on the wrong day and boom. Done. She saw plenty of that with the raiders at the Combat Zone, especially when they captured a crate of Psycho. Every other morning she’d wake up to find another of those dumb arseholes down for the count, twitching and gasping like a fish out of water for a while before going lights out. She always ignored them.

Cait tips Maria all the way onto her back. It’s not ideal if she hurls, but it’s easier to keep tabs on her breathing this way. She’s so limp, her deadweight arms thunking against the floor despite Cait’s efforts to be gentle. And so cold; her skin feels like metro tunnel walls when the rain leaks in. Pressing her ear to Maria’s chest, Cait pushes away her own creeping discomfort by counting breaths, listening to the rhythmic whoosh of air flowing in and out of Maria’s lungs. Too damn slow, but at least it’s steady, not labored. If that changes, Cait decides, she’ll go find someone. Not that anyone else here would know what to do. Maybe Piper could write a stirring eulogy.

“Fuckin’ idiot,” Cait mutters half-heartedly. Why didn’t Maria tell her? It’s not like Cait’s in much of a position to judge, even if she wanted to. And while Med-X may not be her poison of choice—there’s nothing better at blunting pain, but she feels too sluggish and stupid on it—she could at least help, maybe keep Maria from doing… this.

Was it part of her pre-war existence, too? Was her perfect little life more tarnished than it seemed? Or is this a recent development? Shite, can’t really blame her if it is. When hell is all you’ve known, that’s one thing, but when you’ve had a taste of heaven? You’d do anything to feel it again, even if it’s only the devil wearing wings and a halo.

Better have been worth it.

Cait checks Maria’s breathing and pulse again. Stable. Figures the only time Cait gets to touch her is when she’s half-dead on the floor.

Dammit. Her fingers are starting to itch. She stands and rummages through the drawers in a nearby side table. A few syringes and an empty vial of Med-X, not surprising. Where is Maria even getting the stuff? Cait’s network of suppliers is the product of years of work—coercions and threats, a few choice bets on her fighting prowess, the occasional favor. Maria hasn’t been here long enough for anything like that, but, Cait supposes, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and Maria’s certainly not lacking for will.

There’s a pack of cigarettes and a lighter next to the more exciting goodies; Cait helps herself, then leans up against the wall like some delinquent playing hooky from school—or at least, what she assumes such a delinquent would do; hard to play hooky when you never went to school in the first place. She’s usually not much for smoking, but if she doesn’t find something to occupy her hands, she’ll soon be on the other end of Sanctuary digging through her own drawers, and Maria will be forgotten. 

God, how long has it been since her last hit? Feels like years.

She shakes her head in disgust, the cigarette held between her lips wagging until she pauses long enough to light it. It’s only been a few hours. She’s getting careless. But the cravings have never been so loud, so demanding. She barely notices the rush anymore; the junk only acts to shut the howling up for a while, and even that’s starting to falter. The need twists in her gut like a feral hunger, a rot slowly and inexorably devouring her insides.

If this is what dying feels like, she considers taking back all the times she’s wished for it.

As soon as the first mouthful of smoke hits her airway, she sputters, then coughs. The cough quickly becomes a violent hack. Her hands hit her knees, and the cigarette falls to the floor. She gasps for air that will not come, coughing so hard she’s afraid her lungs will come up out of her throat. When it’s finally over, she can feel something damp on her lips, and she can guess the color before she wipes the back of her hand across her mouth: red.

“All right, then,” she forces out, voice hoarse. The orange glow of the cigarette tip extinguishes under her boot. “No smokes. Guess I’ll just sit here ‘til either you wake up or I gnaw me own arms off.”

Maria remained blissfully passed out during the commotion. Cait sighs and slides down the wall until she’s sitting again, knees to her chest, Maria’s head next to her boots. She hoped the whole coughing-up-blood thing was some kind of bad cold, or maybe the result of breathing in whatever crap floats around the Commonwealth. She hoped it would pass. It’s not.

“We’ve both been keepin’ secrets, haven’t we?”

Sad stories from their pasts might have come out easy enough, but present demons are proving harder to exorcise. God knows there’s been plenty of moments ripe for Cait to spill her guts about the depths of her addiction. But the threat of pushing Maria away always overrode the desire for candor. It’s a new feeling; she’s never had to worry about disappointing anyone before—when dealing with Cait, history’s shown, disappointment tends to come automatically.

Cait works her hands under Maria’s armpits and pulls sideways—an awkward, difficult task given the angle and Maria’s listless body—until Maria’s head is on her lap. There. Can’t go anywhere now. Her fingers find Maria’s pulse again; she leaves them there and their heartbeats syncopate: two of Cait’s for every one of Maria’s.

Closing her eyes and bowing her head, Cait offers a silent prayer to a god she hasn’t believed in for years.

* * *

By the time Maria finally wakes, Cait is nearly asleep herself. Her eyes crack open when Maria makes a sound like a rusted hinge, a dry-mouthed croak that pitches up at the end in equal parts suspicion and curiosity.

“Cait?”

Maria blinks a few times; her pupils at least, Cait notices with some relief, are appropriately dilated within the sleep-coated blur of her eyeballs. For several minutes, that seems to be all she can manage. Then her fingers flex, one finger, one knuckle at a time. Then her feet, the heels of her boots quietly tapping on the floor. Each movement is painfully deliberate, like she’s attempting to manually rewire every brain connection one by one.

Cait stays motionless throughout the process. There’s something uniquely terrifying in seeing Maria so helpless, in seeing the woman who mowed down a dozen raiders from the door of the Combat Zone reduced to little more than a newborn. Her head still rests on Cait’s lap, and what was a practical (right, _practical_ ) choice feels wrong, an assumption of closeness Cait hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve. The thought that she’s witnessing something she shouldn’t sinks its claws in, and only Maria’s leaden weight on her legs keeps Cait from bolting clear across the Commonwealth. It’s none of her business. Never should’ve gotten involved.

The right cables apparently plugged in, Maria suddenly grimaces and squirms, but Cait’s hand on her shoulder stills her.

“Whoa, easy there,” Cait says, and thank God it comes out so much more nonchalant than she feels. “Bet you’re havin’ the worst hangover of your life right now, aren’t you?”

Maria grunts what sounds like an agreement. Then a few more blinks, a few more attempts to sit up. _Easy_ , Cait has learned, is not in Maria’s vocabulary. The muscles in her neck strain with inordinate effort to lift her head, though—after batting away Cait’s offered hand of support—she eventually manages to sit up. Then she vomits.

Not much in her beyond spit and bile, but still, Cait’s glad Maria’s facing away from her.

“What happened?” Maria rasps, still on her hands and knees. Her arms shake.

“Well, I’m no Valentine, but judgin’ from the evidence, I’d say you put this”—Cait picks up the empty amber bottle and waves it around—“in your mouth, and _that_ ”—she jabs the bottle’s neck toward the syringe—“in your arm, and the rest of your body wasn’t too happy about it. You were out cold on the floor when I got here.”

Maria tips onto her left hip, her legs sticking out awkwardly behind her as she swivels to stare at Cait in disbelief. “No, I…” She presses her fingertips to her forehead, working them in circles against the skin, like she means to physically pull out her chem-clouded memories. “That bottle was nearly empty, and there was enough time between—I wasn’t even buzzed!”

The truth begins to knit together from Maria’s three rapidfire lies. No way that bottle was nearly empty, no way she left enough time for the booze to wear off before shooting up, no way she was anything less than shitfaced. Nothing more irritating than denial. It—and the raging crave-headache building behind Cait’s temples—toggles a switch from concern to frustration.

“You could’ve just told me, you know. I would’ve helped you,” Cait says, more accusatory than kind.

Maria’s eyes turn hard, like mud to rock. “I don’t need help.”

“Right, of course you don’t. That’s why you were layin’ in a puddle of your own drool for hours. Look, I don’t care if you shoot up—”

“It’s not—”

“—but I could _help_ you. Shite, I dunno… help you rotate your sites. Make sure your sources are legit. Keep your damn arm from fallin’ off.”

At that last remark, Maria turns away and pulls her left arm against her side, hiding the mottled swelling advertising her habit. It puts the two tattoos decorating her upper arm on display, tattoos Cait spent way too long studying while waiting for her to wake up. They’re unlike anything she’s seen before—far more colorful and detailed than the crude marks the Gunners slap on their faces. The lower one, its outer edges just touching the curve of her bicep, is a hand of cards; a hand Cait assumes is a good one in whatever game was popular back then, because the letters underneath it spell out “LUCKY.” The tattoo above it, closer to the shoulder, is a bit more serious: a dagger piercing a heart, “248 - Death Before Dishonor” on the scrollwork embracing it. There’s a sad irony to both of them now that Maria’s here—her luck ran out the moment she stumbled out of the Vault, and from what Cait’s seen, Maria’s definition of “honor” is an awfully loose one. Her tattoos are relics, symbols of a life Cait will never be able to fathom. How badly does Maria want to return to it? What could Cait possibly give her that would make up for all she was forced to leave behind?

“I have it under control,” Maria insists.

Cait can’t keep from rolling her eyes. “Yeah, that’s what we all say,” she snaps, and dammit, she _meant_ “they,” not “we,” but that cat was let out of the bag when Tommy accused her of being high (which of course she was) right there in the cage, just as Maria was debating whether or not Cait was worth the risk. But Maria only looked at Tommy, looked at her, and shrugged.

That acceptance is nowhere to be found now, not in the tight pull of Maria’s lips or the line between her brows. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was in the army, remember?” Maria pauses as though expecting an answer, as though Cait’s supposed to know anything about the army, much less the army in the twenty-first fucking century. When Cait offers nothing but a dead-eyed stare, Maria continues: “They invented Psycho. A lot of us ended up being test subjects. I can spot an addict from a mile away. Insomnia, tremors, random aggressive outbursts…” Her eyes and voice turn flinty, the last wisps of hangover fog evaporated. “Have you started coughing up blood yet?”

The observation hits like a frigid slap. So Maria knows. She knew all along. All Cait’s evasion, all the covert doses in back alleys and side rooms, all the excuses for her erratic behavior… all for nothing. Maria kept that knowledge to herself, only pulling it out when she could use it as a weapon. Shame and fury ignite a scorching blush up Cait’s neck. She scrambles to her feet.

“Oh, that’s how it’s gonna be? Can’t face your own problems so you go and shove mine in me face. That’s real nice,” she says, sarcasm her shield.

“My own problems?” God.” A short, cutting laugh spills from Maria’s lips. “You really think we’re…” She trails off, then shakes her head. “No, forget it.”

Cait stares down at Maria—a woman who just a few minutes before was far too close to death to even think of declaring herself problem-free—while her own demons scream inside her head. Once again she’s forced into focusing on Maria to quiet them, though now through a lens of anger rather than adoration.

“We’re what? Tell me what I think, Maria. Spit it out. I can take it.”

The look Maria gives her is softer, apologetic, and it makes everything worse. “You really think we’re the same.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Cait’s ears are filled with a buzzing, a swarm of bloatflies devouring the walking corpse Psycho has made of her. It makes her want to put her fist through the crumbling plaster of the prefab’s wall; she wraps her arms around herself instead, tight as a straitjacket.

“You know what? I’ve never thought that. Ever. I thought you were different. Better,” she says, earning a defiant glare from Maria—she’ll take it; easier to handle than pity, at least. “But you’re not, are you? You’re a piece of shite, just like me, just like everyone else on this bloody hellhole of a planet!” Her boots thud hollowly against the sagging wood floor as she paces into and around what used to be the kitchen. “Actin’ all high and mighty while you sit there with your arm lookin’ like that… un-fuckin’-believable.”

“Hey, I never claimed to be a good person,” Maria says, and now she too is standing, though she needs to lean on the chair for support. “Too many people in my life have tried putting me on a pedestal, and they’ve regretted it every single time. I don’t need you doing it, too.”

 _Hero_. Maria said that’s what they called her when she came home from Alaska. _I didn’t do anything to earn that title. I wasn’t brave. I didn’t save anyone. The only thing I did was not die_. Cait’s never met a hero; it sounds like bullshit, like something out of a comic book or a fairytale. Maybe there were heroes in Maria’s time, but they don't exist in the modern Commonwealth, she knows that much.

“I don’t give a damn if you’re a good person or not. You’ve just gotta be honest with me. But since it’s clear you can’t be, I will.” Something in Cait’s lungs threatens to stir as she takes a deep breath, and she lets the air out prematurely in a weak sigh; the last thing she needs before this confession is another coughing fit. “You’re right. I’m a fuckin’ worthless junkie.” That gets Maria sputtering, all half-baked protests and excuses, but Cait waves them off. “No, you let me finish,” she commands, and Maria’s mouth snaps shut. “You saw it true: I’ve been takin’ Psycho for years, and I’m long past the point of actin’ like I’ve still got it together. The whole time you were passed out, I wanted nothin’ more than to leave you here so I could go have another hit where I knew you couldn’t see.”

Now it’s Maria’s turn to ask, a mirror of Cait’s earlier question: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was scared!”

“Of what?”

Cait picks at the flaking butter-yellow laminate at the edge of the countertop; the pattern on it blurs together into an amorphous blob. “Of admittin’ how bad it is. Scared of dyin’, or maybe livin’... I don’t even know anymore. And I was… scared of what you’d think of me. Though God knows why, the way you’re treatin’ me now.”

“After everything we’ve talked about, you’re still worried about that?” Maria asks quietly, and she has the gall to look hurt.

“Tell me this, then. Your soldier friends—the addicts, the ones you saw spittin’ blood… what did you think of them?”

“I… I don’t know. They weren’t all my friends. Honestly, most weren’t. I didn’t really know them that well. They were infantry, so I’d see them around, but—”

“Stop stallin’ and answer the damn question.” Not like she doesn’t already know what Maria’s going to say.

“I was… angry,” Maria says, and _there_ it is at last. “We were supposed to be in control of ourselves at all times. Psycho seemed like it was against everything we stood for. Not that I really knew what the hell we stood for anymore by the time I got out, but… it just—it felt wrong.”

 _It felt wrong._ It feels wrong to use, too, but that only comes after, when the euphoria’s burned out like a flame starved of oxygen, when she feels like she’s coated in lead, when it’s plucked each petal off until she’s nothing but a naked stem, when it’s taken back everything it gave, plus a piece of her soul as interest. And even then, it’s only wrong until it’s not. It’s only wrong until nothing on earth could be more right than another hit.

“So maybe now you understand why I didn’t want to tell you,” Cait says.

“But it’s not the same! I didn’t know them. You and I are…” Maria gestures vaguely. “Well, we’re closer than that. It’s different.”

Something in Cait’s chest clenches traitorously when she wonders just how close Maria thinks they are. “Is it? You don’t know shite about why they took it. Maybe they didn’t have a choice. Maybe it was the only thing gettin’ them through the day. Maybe they thought they”—she makes air quotes—“‘had it under control.’ But would knowin’ that have stopped you from judgin’ ‘em?”

For a moment, Maria seems like she wants to argue, but instead she folds, looking every bit the sort of woman who drugs herself into unconsciousness. “I… no, I guess I wouldn’t,” she says, then sighs. “I probably look like a huge hypocrite, don’t I.”

“You said it, not me.”

Maria walks over to the side table and starts to pull open the middle drawer before noticing her cigarettes and lighter are already on top of the table. She glances over her shoulder at Cait—who can only smile and shrug—then fishes a cigarette from the pack. For several minutes, they don’t speak. Maria smokes, and Cait watches her smoke. Blatantly, shamelessly, because watching Maria’s lips wrap around the filter and her fingers tap off the ash presses a pillow to the face of Cait’s Psycho cravings, even if it’s only substituting one yearning for another.

“I guess if we’re being honest,” Maria says, halfway through her third cigarette, “do you remember when I told you how I was injured during the war?”

Like it was something Cait could ever forget. Everyone knows about “the war,” but most details beyond “the bombs fell and the world went to hell” have been lost through time’s sieve. To have access to someone who actually fought in it? Even Cait couldn’t deny a spark of excitement when she found out. Until she asked, and Maria answered, bit by terrible bit, the reality so much crueler than any historian’s drivel.

“Yeah,” Cait says. “Some bastard ratted you out, your squad died, you were captured, and then the bad guys”—the smoke leaking from Maria’s mouth quivers in the dusty twilight gloom—“hurt you. ‘Course I remember. Why?”

“After my surgery, the docs told me I might still have pain every once in a while. A common side-effect, they said. They gave me a prescription for Med-X, told me to take it as needed, and sent me on my way.” She takes another long drag, staring out a broken window on the other side of the room. “And I… I did. I took the pills, because they were needed. But now I’m here and…”

“No more pills.” Maria nods. “I didn’t know Med-X even came like that. Never seen so much as an empty bottle of ‘em before.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the short time I’ve been here, it’s that you make do with what you have. _This_ shit,” she snarls, kicking the empty syringe and sending it skittering across the floor, “is what I have. Because I’m no good to anyone if I’m stuck in bed crying over my fucking back.”

How many times has Cait told herself the same thing? Just a little, just enough to get her to the next morning, the next fight, just enough to keep her from replaying her parents’ deaths like a cinema projector on the backs of her eyelids every night. And now she’s here, trapped in a private hell of her own making, and there’s no better vantage point to witness Maria’s fall than rock bottom.

"How long?" Cait asks. "Since you started usin' it?"

“Three years,” Maria admits.

“Might be why I’m in worse shape, then.” Cait’s words catch in her throat, but it’s too late to swallow them. “I’ve had nearly a decade of this shite buildin’ up in me. I’ve tried quittin’ more times than I can count, but I haven’t been able to stay clean for more than a few weeks before I go crawlin’ back to it. Maybe you don’t need it, or you’re too proud to admit it, but I… fuck.” Her voice breaks and hot tears drip down her cheeks to splat against that hideous yellow countertop. “I’m losin’ this fight. I need help.”

Maria stubs out her cigarette. “What do we need to do?” she asks, brusque but not unkind, ever the soldier. If anything, she seems relieved to no longer have the spotlight pointed at her own issues.

So Cait tells her—hesitantly, like Maria’s offer of help could be yanked away at any moment—about Vault 95. Her last hope, the answer to her prayers, courtesy of the bastards at Vault-Tec. Whispers of it reached her ears nearly two years ago from a raider who knew a bloke who knew another bloke who ran with the Gunners. _There’s a Vault down south by the Glowing Sea_ , he said. _They did some sorta addiction experiment there. My buddy says they’ve got a machine that’ll clean anyone up, no matter how much junk you’re on._ She called him a fucking liar, he made the mistake of throwing a punch at her, and that was the last she heard of Vault 95.

She's pointed herself southwest and started walking a hundred, a thousand times. And every time, she stops and turns around, too afraid of the creatures that lurk by the Sea, of the Gunners infesting the Vault itself, of ridding herself of the drug that’s defined her life for the past eight years.

“We’ll go,” Maria says, and Cait wants so damn badly to believe her, to believe this— _she_ —is an oasis and not just another mirage.

She’ll get clean. She has to—the alternative is now more than she can bear. But maybe she won’t be the only one.


	4. Maria

The chair’s shiny brown leather crunches and sighs as Maria gingerly settles her full weight against it. Still warm. It—this whole room—is unsettlingly pristine; the passing of time has done little more than fray the chair’s stitching slightly. It’s an anachronism in a rusted Vault filled with dust and skeletons. She doubts this place was ever used. Why would it? Vault-Tec never meant for any of the residents to maintain their sobriety. If anything, this room feels like insurance for their own employees: dip into the hidden chem stash before it gets unleashed on a Vault full of recovering addicts? No problem, grab your keycard and pay a visit to Research. We’ll get you fixed up real quick. Got to be in tip-top shape to efficiently fuck up seventy people’s lives, right?

Maria blinks under the harsh fluorescent glare of the floor lamp aimed directly at her; it’s the only light in the room, but it’s strong enough to bathe everything in a cool, sterile glow. Feels less like a medical facility and more like an interrogation room, though she was always on the other side of the table, never in the hot seat. She decides to look at the peeling olive green wallpaper to her right; better that than the array of surgical tools neatly aligned on the table to her left, or Cait, standing in front of her, carefully snapping the metal wrist restraints into place.

The air here is cold, even for a Vault, and it carries a distinct antiseptic tang that reminds Maria too much of medic tents and operating rooms. It makes steadying her breathing difficult. But she has to, because that last _click_ —audible even over the background drone of the basement reactor—means she’s trapped. Just to make sure, she jerks her hands up and back. The restraints hold tight. She can feel Cait’s eyes on her, but Maria stares at the yellowing Loyalty Corps poster nailed to the wall instead, ignoring the chair’s massive right-hand electrode looming in her peripheral vision. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

“Maria,” Cait says softly.

Maria turns her head so slowly it would surely creak if she were made of metal instead of (mostly) flesh and bone. And there is Cait, slightly crouched so their eyes are level, one hand still on the shackle enclosing Maria’s right wrist. She’s too damn close, too damn calm.

“I’m not pressin’ any buttons until you tell me to.”

And Maria believes her, but she also believes she’s not leaving this chair until that button is pressed.

“Will it hurt?” is all she can think to ask, like a child at the doctor’s office waiting for a shot. _Stupid_ , she scolds herself. Of course it will; Cait made that abundantly clear not ten minutes ago. Maria hadn’t heard screams like that since Anchorage.

Cait’s eyes are so bright, so green. Were they always like that? How has Maria not noticed before? “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it’ll hurt like hell. But it’ll hurt more if you don’t do it.”

Maria swallows past the lump of fear in her throat. She’s suffered through three years of pain, after all. What’s a little more? She should be brave. Isn’t that what they called her in the _Bugle?_

_The country rejoices as the only surviving member of ODA 248 was discovered alive last night in an abandoned trench two hundred and fifty miles northeast of Anchorage. The president is expected to make a speech commending her bravery this evening._

She’s never understood the fanfare. There is nothing valiant about survival. The simplest of animals manage it daily without getting medals pinned on them for it. If Maria’s efforts were worth all that, every single human in the modern Commonwealth, shit, the modern _world_ , ought to be showered in accolades.

This, at least, is her choice. Maybe there’s some bravery in that.

It wasn’t a choice she planned on making when she agreed to bring Cait here, or when she plugged her Pip-Boy into the blast door’s access controller, or even when she stood outside this very room and urged Cait to go through with the procedure when her will started to falter.

But when Cait peeled herself out of the chair, reeling and gasping for air, the first words out of her mouth were: “Your turn.”

Maria resisted, of course. This whole Vault is for _addicts_ —those scraping the bottom of life’s barrel, so desperate for help they turned to Vault-Tec for rehab. This place, this room, isn’t meant for someone who occasionally injects the only sort of medication this hellish wasteland has to offer, who _already_ successfully quit once before for one hundred and ninety-nine days, who would have _stayed_ clean if the whole planet hadn’t decided to cannibalize itself. She can quit again if she has to, when the time is right. She doesn’t need what Cait needs.

She told Cait this, made her arguments as bulletproof as she could, while Cait listened with uncharacteristic patience. She waited for Maria to finish, and then she said, “Do it for your son.”

And all Maria’s excuses shattered.

The search for Shaun has grown hypothermic. Valentine’s sleuthing narrowed the kidnapper’s location down to somewhere west of Boston, but Kellogg is proving a hard man to track, and all the rage in the world isn’t making the process move any faster. Her son has been missing for two months. Preventing despair from pulling her down into apathy is a constant battle, one Maria, in her darkest moments, hasn’t always won. One particularly cruel night, she realized his captors might very well be the ones to hear his first words, and she almost gave up. Almost.

Twice now she’s failed him. Once the day he was born, and again one hundred and ninety-nine days—plus two centuries—later. She will not fail him again.

Maria opens her mouth to say “I’m ready,” but what comes out is “I’m scared.” Her voice doesn’t sound like her own; it’s frail and meek, hardly the voice of a driven, vengeful mother.

“I know.” Cait is studying Maria’s face like it’s the first time she’s ever seen it. “But I’ll be right here when you’re through to the other side.”

Cait has given little away about her own detox experience. When the terminal indicated the procedure was over, when the room was silent and Maria could finally muster the courage to look through the observation windows, Cait was on her feet, swaying slightly, brow furrowed in confusion. Maria asked if she was okay and Cait offered little more than a nod, her eyes distant and glassy. The only thing she seems interested in communicating is a desire to get Maria in the chair and through a process that, given Cait’s reticence, might not even work.

The longer she sits here, the larger Maria’s paranoia becomes, feasting on her dread. Her attempts to control her nervous system begin to fail. Every breath is a shallow pant of caustic air; her heartbeats start to blur. The chair’s armrests are slippery with sweat. With each passing second, the restraints around her wrists feel tighter, ready to snap her bones like kindling, like her spine under the boot of a stolen T-45. She shuts her eyes and, for the millionth time in the last two months, focuses on the mission.

 _Do it for your son_.

“Press the fucking button.”

The room’s rubber floor mats muffle the sounds of Cait’s retreating footsteps. For a small eternity, Maria hears nothing but the generator’s whir and her own frantic pulse. Then a low hum, so quiet she’s not sure it’s real, that it’s not just a fabrication of a panicking brain desperately grasping for stimuli. But it grows steadily louder and broader, a thrum resonating in the bones of her skull, parietal to temporal to mandible, then back up, vibrating in the empty spaces of her sinuses.

Something sharp and cold presses on her temples. The electrode contacts. She grips the armrests, digging her fingers into the leather, and waits. She doesn’t have to be brave. She only has to survive.

Maria shoves her tongue against the roof of her mouth to force her jaw to unclench. The hum is now a whine, the angry wail of mechanical ghosts. A tingling sensation runs down her neck, like water dripping behind her ears. She shivers.

Are the contacts getting warmer? It seems like it, but they’re set so firmly against her head it’s hard to tell. The tingling spreads, first down the central channel of her spine, then to each arm and leg. It’s somewhere between a caress, a tickle, and the pins-and-needles feeling of a limb falling asleep. Every hair on her body stands on end. When it’s finally crawled into her fingers and toes, when it’s everywhere—outside and in, skin and muscle and bone—the pain starts.

A full-body jolt slams her into the back of the chair. The pain pulsates through her, rocketing down each nerve, slicing through each cell. Her breath seizes in her lungs, the muscles responsible for inhalation paralyzed. The contacts burn against, _into_ her skin.

Her limbs jerk on their own accord, fighting the incorporeal enemy that’s infiltrated her body, and the restraints mash into the backs of her hands. It feels like her blood’s been lit on fire. It feels like a fumigation, like something inside her is being forced out through every pore. She tries to yank her head away from the electrodes to get some modicum of relief, but the energy burrows into her skull and holds her fast. It wriggles through her brain, twisting, rearranging, exploding colors into the inky blackness of her closed eyes.

The vice squeezing her chest loosens for half a second, and she sucks in an opportunistic lungful of air. And then something _pulls_ , rips the marrow from her bones and bathes the hollow chasms left behind with acid, and that air fuels her screams. Fuck the mission. Fuck everything. Nothing matters but the pain. The pain wipes it all away, obliterating who she was, who she is, who she will become.

Something tugs her upward, suspending her somewhere outside of herself. Black spots float across her vision, across the thrashing woman in the chair beneath her, hundreds of tiny roaches crawling over the detox room and over her. The universe spins, then dissolves, like sugar stirred into tea. She no longer feels the chair on her back or the ground under her feet, only a cold numbness washing over the remains of her flayed body.

With a sudden, startling clarity, Maria realizes she is going to die. She welcomes it.

And then it’s over.

The world rushes in to fill the empty vessel the pain made of her. She breathes sweet, merciful air reeking of sweat and ozone. The chair’s electrical squeal leaks from her ears, and the quiet drone of the Vault takes its place. She breathes some more and gently works her fingertips free from where she jammed them into the armrests.

When she finally opens her eyes, Cait is in front of her again, her own eyes shiny with tears. But she’s smiling, and Maria’s never seen anything more lovely in her life.

Cait’s mouth moves, miming speech, but no sound comes out. For a few terrifying seconds, Maria believes the procedure glitched, that whatever part of her brain responsible for processing words was somehow destroyed. Then, slowly, neurons stripped and cleansed start to synapse again.

“—still in there?”

Maria works her tongue around her mouth and flexes her jaw. Lucky she didn’t crack a tooth or bite her tongue off. She feels like a newborn, then a toddler, then an adolescent, relearning everything at lightning speed. English, a few bits of Spanish, old pre-war lexicon and new post-war jargon. It’s dizzying. Her head thuds softly against the chair’s back.

“Come back to me, Maria.”

She _is_ here, but Maria can’t get the words out to offer any reassurance. Everything is so bright, so saturated—the lamp is the surface of the sun, the walls green as the trees in the summers of her childhood, Cait’s hair a raging bonfire. Cait’s fingers brush across Maria’s bruised, aching wrists as she releases the restraints, and Maria would gasp if she could. The sensation is shocking in its intensity. It feels like every sensory dial in her head is cranked to a new maximum, a level that didn’t exist before.

Before. Something tells her she has crossed some kind of threshold, that when her mind fully returns to her, there will be a Maria before this room and a Maria after this room, and they won’t be the same person. She is not the same person now, she’s sure of it. There’s something missing, but she can’t figure out what it is.

Cait’s smile is gone, replaced with a worried frown. She’s so close Maria thinks she can count every freckle across her nose, every eyelash. “Did it work?” she asks tentatively. “Please say somethin’. You’re startin’ to scare me.”

And then Maria understands. The pain. Her constant companion for the last three years, the abusive lover she placated with alcohol and Med-X, is gone. She never noticed how it shaped her life before ( _before_ ), how it redefined reality to become her normal. Its silence is deafening.

Cait was right. About everything.

Maria is free. Her mouth cracks into a grin and a giddy laugh bubbles up from her chest. “Yes,” she says. “It worked.”

“Oh, thank god.” Cait collapses into her, half-hugging Maria, half-hugging the chair that ruined and saved their lives.

Maria laughs until she cries, until she slides from the chair and they’re on the floor, clinging to each other and sobbing, the only survivors in a Vault littered with corpses both fresh and ancient.

When they separate, Maria looks at Cait’s face, smudged with dirt and blood, eyes puffy and red-rimmed, so terribly raw and beautiful, and all she can think to say is: “What the fuck.”

Cait giggles. It’s a sound Maria’s not sure she’s ever heard from her before. “Fuck you, Vault-Tec,” she says, and pulls Maria into a kiss.

Everything is still amplified—the feeling of Cait’s lips on hers, of Cait’s skin under her hands, is just this side of ecstasy, and Maria can barely keep a whimper from slipping into Cait’s mouth. It’s exquisite. Every other kiss Maria has had belongs to before; this is new, a rewriting, practiced brushstrokes on fresh canvas. A resurrection.

She draws back before she’s overwhelmed completely. The expression on Cait’s face is inscrutable: joy and triumph, anxiety and embarrassment cycle through in flashes. Maria takes Cait’s hand in her own, running her thumb over knuckles split open and healed countless times. These hands—hers and Cait’s both—have done so many horrible things: killing and breaking, pulling triggers and pushing plungers. Maybe it’s time for something different.

“Thank you,” Maria says. Cait nods and smiles, and somehow, without further elaboration, Maria knows the feeling—every feeling—is mutual. She takes a deep breath of the present and the future.

“Take me home?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a response you can choose in Cait's final affinity conversation, after you confess your love for her and she asks, "Why? Why would you fall in love with someone as screwed up as I am?" Sole can say: "To tell you the truth, we're both a little screwed up... a perfect match for one another." And I was like wow, what a perfect line! I was really drawn to the idea of a Sole hanging out on Cait's end of the "fucked up-----well-adjusted" scale, what that would look like for their relationship, and how they would bounce off of each other at rock bottom (hence the fic title!). I'm really pleased with what I ended up with, and I hope you are, too! I have plenty of works planned for these two, so expect more coming soon :D Thanks for reading!


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